Free of Christmas - Mike Hickman

This was the Friday Malcolm got to put Christmas away for another year.

Or, to be more exact, to put school Christmas away. A whole month of carols and preparations for the Christmas play and wrapping presents for people he’d never meet in countries he’d never thought of. A whole month of Christmas spice smells and orange peel and fake snow and tinsel and glitter and fairy lights. And all of it preceded by months of anticipation, almost the whole way since the new school year had started in September.

Everyone making out that Christmas was somehow better than any other time of the year. Making him feel that, whatever they went home to, it couldn’t be like his own experience.

Of course he’d want to be free of it as soon as the final bell rang and school was out. Surely anyone would understand that?

Getting off the bus at the end of his road, Malcolm heaved his bag back over his shoulder and began the icy trudge to his front door. He’d sling it down on the floor and leave it there to moulder over the holiday. Last year, curdled banana remains had spent two weeks soaking into the cards and presents he’d been given by the class. Somehow, it had felt appropriate.

He could still smell banana over the vanilla of the scented candle he’d been given by dopey Hannah. Never to be lit, of course. Maybe given away next year to someone else in school. Maybe a present for someone closer to home. It wasn’t like he’d had the chance to think about presents yet.

Malcolm rattled through his pockets for the keys. There’d been the year when he’d dropped them in the playground on the way out and had to go all the way back. The caretaker who they all called Keys McGruder to his face and much worse behind his back had sworn at having to come back out again to unlock the gates in the snow. He had his holiday plans, too, even if most of those involved coming in for builders and cleaners. But at least there’d be no kids about. One thing everyone knew about Keys McGruder was just how much he hated children. Malcolm could well understand.

If he was lucky, he wouldn’t see or think about anyone in his class for the next two weeks.

The keys finally released themselves from a ball of used tissue and sweet wrappers. Malcolm didn’t let them drop onto the path. He could do without that earache right at the start of the hols. The door, though, was stiff, and it was only as he pushed that he realised that the post had yet to be taken in. No cards, of course. Not for him, anyway.

The curtains were still drawn in the dark living room, but there was no surprise there, given the time they left in the morning. Given that he was back early today – earlier than perhaps he’d been back all year. End of term. A chance for him to exist in daylight without school. Short though the days might be.

For some of the children in Malcolm’s class, this would be an escape into a couple of weeks of ranging the estates on the bikes they rode with such intimidating ease. With the bikes they got for Christmas, perhaps. Now, there was something else to inflame the jealousy. Malcolm had been lucky to get a second hand book some years. Luckier still if the pages weren’t stuck together or it was one he wanted to read. For others in the class, this would be a chance to experience all that primary school had so resolutely failed to give them. A trip abroad with the family, say, if their parents were prepared to pay over-the-odds for not sneaking away during term time as so many did. These would be the children who would come back tanned to rust, full of the kind of stories Malcolm had never been able to truthfully tell. They’d clutch souvenirs and postcards that they’d then give away to increase their popularity still further.

All that and pressies and tinsel and turkey, too, Malcolm thought.

Whatever. Let them all go where they would because, at long last, he was free to get out of the ridiculous uniform and just be himself. Across Christmas and New Year, there would be no more pretending to know things he didn’t know. Not only would he be spared the excruciatingly embarrassing PE lessons, there’d also be a pause in the failed science experiments and the cringe-inducingly slow answers in maths. Better even than that, there’d be no visits to the Head’s office, trying to explain himself – not that she ever understood him, anyway. Particularly when she’d challenged him about not wanting to join in with the school Christmas Fayre because he had a “thing” about Christmas that, no, he wasn’t going to explain. The year-long lie could be put to one side with his school tie.

Two weeks. End of term. A chance for him to stop the “obsessing about school” that they argued about so often at home.

Malcolm only noticed the envelope when he’d flung himself back on the creaking springs of the sofa and started to unbutton the straining shirt. Frowning, he leaned forward, recognising his name and the handwriting and the smudges in the ink.

The children’s Christmas gifts were still in his bag. The comedy musical Christmas tie was draped over the unwatered pot plant where the Christmas tree might have been if he hadn’t left it so late because he’d had his Christmas already. And everyone else’s, it felt like.

Unfolding the letter, reading the tear-smeared words, the all too conscious Christmas curmudgeon and primary school teacher, Malcolm Cook, was left it no doubt that now, for him, this year, he really had put Christmas away.

Originally published by Dwelling Literary, 2020

Sometimes Doctor, always writer, Mike Hickman (@MikeHicWriter) is from York, England. He has written for Off the Rock Productions (stage and audio), including a 2018 play about Groucho Marx and Erin Fleming. Since 2020 he has been published in Agapanthus (Best of the Net nominated), EllipsisZine, the Bitchin’ Kitsch, the Cabinet of Heed, Sledgehammer, and Red Fez.